Kay always used to try and plan her recordings so that therewas no blank space left at the end of the tape. So if she had only five minutesleft at the end of one side, it was a case of finding two short tracks or onelong one. The worst possible scenario was losing the last few seconds of a songbecause the tape had run out.
Running order was just as important. It couldn’t just be arandom collection of favourite tracks. It had to flow, just like a decent albumdid. And most importantly of all, it had to kick off with a killer track to setthe scene.
Putting the headphones to her ears, she pressed play and hereardrums were instantly assailed by the opening bars of “Smells Like TeenSpirit” by Nirvana. She listened for a bit, remembering how much this song hadinspired her as a teenager, then switched off as the time had come to board.
She could listen to the rest on the flight, indulgingherself in this simple, uncomplicated pleasure. She never seemed to spend anytime listening to music anymore. There were simply too many other distractionsin the modern world.
She didn’t have her tapes anymore either. Alan had takenthem all up to the local tip when he was having a clear-out without asking her.When she had protested, he had said they were obsolete. They no longer had acassette player in the house, so what was the point in keeping them?
He didn’t understand that there were memories locked up inthose tapes, and all the hours of fun compiling them. Now they were goneforever, buried under a mountain of decomposing chicken bones and babies’nappies.
Boarding went smoothly and in a matter of minutes she wasseated on the plane. The plane was something else that didn’t seem to havechanged much in the last quarter of a century. It was exactly the same designas pretty much every other plane she had ever been on.
She now had time to relax and listen to her tape. It wasn’ta long flight, no more than an hour and a half, which gave her time to ponderwhat she should do with the remaining five days she had. She had barely hadtime to take stock of her situation until now, but sitting in her seat, thetruth of what she was doing suddenly hit her.
“I am really here! This is really happening,” she said outloud, attracting on odd glance from the middle-aged woman in the seat next toher. Kay had a habit of speaking out loud to no one in particular and right nowshe felt so liberated she wanted to shout out, “I’m free!” at the top of hervoice but resisted the temptation to do so. Instead, she sat back quietly andthought carefully about how to make the best of this amazing opportunity shehad been given.
She could use her days for pleasure, reliving the highlightsof her life in a sort of greatest hits compilation, rather like one of hertapes.
She could go back to pivotal moments like the one she hadjust experienced in the airport with Alan, and see how things might have turnedout differently, for that day at least.
Or she could make a bucket list of things to do, like seeingthe midnight sun. The only restriction was she only had one day to make thesethings happen, but you could do a lot in one day, provided it didn’t involveanything on the other side of the world.
There may have been limitations on travel due to time, butthere were no such restrictions where money was concerned. Anything expensivecould go on a credit card that would never need to be paid off.
Those were all positive ideas, but she had darker thoughts,too, invariably involving Alan. What would it feel like to kill him? She foundherself picturing the shocked expression on his face as she plunged a carvingknife into his chest. Could she really bring herself to do something like that?
No, she couldn’t, but she could sure as hell humiliate himin some way. Her mind mused over the possibilities. Jilt him at the altar?Expose his infidelities? All these ideas were satisfying in one way or another,but would they really be worth it? Was petty revenge really what she wanted todo with her days? She was better than that, wasn’t she? Surely there must bebetter ways of utilising her time.
There were so many possibilities that she was finding itdifficult to narrow them down into anything concrete. The angel had said sixdays were enough, but were they? Kay could easily have thought of sixty thingsto do if she had put her mind to it. Perhaps she needed to try and combine someof her ideas in some sort of time-travelling multitasking.
Maybe she could right a wrong, live out a missed experienceand make some positive contribution to her own future all in the same day ifshe picked the right day. She had done a pretty good job with it already in thecurrent day. If she could build on that, then she had a very interesting fewdays ahead of her.
She found it frustrating that she couldn’t do anything tochange history, but she could see the angel’s point on that. She knew all aboutparadoxes from the time travel films she had seen. If she changed the past soshe didn’t end up in the flat in the chip shop, then she would never have endedup in the depressing mess that had brought the angel to her door in the firstplace.
Not being able to take anything back into the past orforward into the future was also very restrictive, but that rule only appliedto physical things. It didn’t apply to her knowledge. She already had thebenefit of hindsight when travelling to the past, which allowed her to make themost of her trips back, but could it work the other
